[Nautilus-list] Re: Oh no, more feature requests!!

[David Rosky <dave rosky tsc tdk com>]

>Mac OS X seems to have moved to other style, still
>hides but not as others, you still have a full tree, just some part
>are hidden until user changes that.

Speaking as a user (not a UI expert):

It is true that UNIX has a single tree file system and that DOS/Win/NT
does not.  But what really matters in a file manager (which is the users'
viewport into the file system) is not really how the file system is
physically organized, but how people actually think, organizationally
speaking.  So, it might be desirable to add structure abstraction to the 
underlying file system to present it in a more natural way (to humans).

Obviously, different people think differently, but
people are generally used to organizing things in such a way that
there are already several categories at the top level, as opposed
to one door that leads to all the universe.  For example, an office 
may have many file cabinets all visible from the desk, not one file
cabinet with one big drawer that you open to see more file
cabinets and more drawers.  My kitchen has many drawers and cabinets 
all visible from the floor, I don't have one cabinet that leads to 
all other cabinets.

And even with all those cabinets and drawers, I don't have any problem
remembering where the silverware is.  People can handle more than one item 
at the first level of an organization hierarchy, and I suspect most people
actually *prefer* this because it is natural in our environments.

In the case of computers, I think it is very natural for people
to view multiple remote mounted file systems at the top level of the 
hierarchy as Juliano's picture indicates, because that's the way
they *think*.  Computers are separate physical objects, and people
tend to think of them at equal levels in the hierarchy of things.

Perhaps OS X got this right by making their system adaptive, because
it allows different people to impose different abstractions on the
UNIX single-tree hierarchy which, while it is the way things are
physically organized on a UNIX system, may not really reflect the
way most people view the world.

Since people with different viewpoints could argue about this for
a long time, perhaps it is best to give the user a choice.  Multiple
abstractions could be provided, one of which is a single tree (maybe
this would still be the default), and another of which is something 
on the order of what Juliano suggests.  In addition, maybe a mechanism 
could be added so that advanced users could even customize the abstraction 
to some degree.

-D